http://greenwhite.org/2007/09/21/aboutusorg-dev-office-in-lahore-what-do-they-do/

AboutUs kept going ahead Ray King was a smart entrepreneur even at the height of economic crises AboutUs secured a 2.5 Million USD Funding, and recently went ahead and bought another startup Jyte in January.

How ever it seems all is not well,  they recently closed their Lahore office, here is the post from Ray’s own blog to confirm it. What could have gone wrong?

Let me be very clear here I don’t believe that closing of Lahore office had any thing to do with revenues or cost cutting, because just a couple of months back they acquired a company if it was for getting money for that, the closure would have come before the acquisition, and nothing suggests that their revenues have dwindled, for me the problem lies some where else.

I have been aware of AboutUs Lahore setup from start till very recently, AboutUs started with a lot of passion in Lahore I remember their first employees were paid huge premiums about 20~30k above market price for fresh grads which created a lot stir in the local IT startups, It was a dream company with high wages beautiful office location and brand new power full PCs, it was a startup environment with lots of money. Engineers got to work on their own projects which were both complex and cutting edge, and content writers were paid heavily for doing what they loved to do.

How ever until recently all was well, then there was a change, the management which setup the office here went away, as far as I know AboutUS tried to remotely manage the Lahore office and the people in middle management tried to grab the vacant top position and unfortunately some times it happens to us as a nation to get to the top the easiest way we know is to trample some one else. I am not sure and can’t confirm that this is the only reason but I am sure that some one sitting miles away if feels rift with in the team it does not bode well. Also if it means that their concentration is divided into solving internal office issues instead of growing the business they might do what Ray has done, it is unfortunate for us though.

Disclaimer : The speculations in this posts are based on first person info got from several people attached with aboutus.

Here is the typical scenario.

A new startup is founded the founders work day and night try to hire the best talent in what ever limited budget constraints that they have groom them, stay up at nights to see the business end while mentoring their young team in day time. After several sleepless nights and frustrating days, things finally start to fall in place, they don’t have to monitor every communication of their team can assign tasks and expect things delivered, repeat clients/projects/products start happening around, the startup starts making some profit, and the founders finally feel that the initial issues are done with, they start thinking about growth new areas to explore…. Then suddenly it starts happening, all their senior team, people who they have taught and built up with start leaving one by one, and the drainage is very rapid with in a couple of months the founding members find the with another group of young (and maybe senior developers if they had funds) who they need to start with all over again, and this cycle goes on and on.

I have seen this happen to multiple times to multiple organizations, some times this is so devastating that the organization simply fades away.

And this rapid exit does not happen due to foreign immigrations or studies, because that is a continuous trickle the managing group knows about that trickle and counters it, they are aware of admission times and dates when people leave for studies.

There can be multiple reasons and probably you readers are in a better position to comment on this, but in few instances i saw and was able to identify in one of them was that the drain starts with one senior person going to a competing organization. Since most of our Organizations work in a hierarchy where the immediate Project Manager or Manager is the closest to employees, and we don’t usually rotate the employees from their groups (so in a span of one organization one employee would have worked mostly with the same manager), he starts pulling his best sub-ordinates and as he is aware of in an out of the organization knows the weakness and uses those to lure away the second layer as well.

But that is only one area I was able to pin point, there are I know multiple reasons, and till now I have not seen any counter measures that works to stop this, if you have seen experienced this and had some how managed to survive or counter this, I am sure others would benefit greatly from the experience.

Do speak out, lets see if we can find a solution to this.

As any experienced business person and entrepreneur can tell, legal matters are extremely important. It so happens that law firms can be intimidating to many and legal matters also tend to be costly. Naeem’s book helps entrepreneurs to get educated about the whole process and to get the maximun value out of your legal spending. The book provides many little-known facts, secrets, techniques, and tricks which can make life easy for a startup team.

Some of the important points Naeem touches upon include:

• The different things lawyers can (and cannot) help you accomplish.
• The inner workings of a law firm, and how to use that knowledge to lower your legal bills.
• Choosing the right lawyer for you.
• When you should first contact a lawyer.
• Why you might want to choose a large law firm over a small one—or vice versa.
• When you may need to create a legal entity (incorporation), and what options you have.
• How to leave your current employer in a way that causes minimum trouble later.
• How to protect your ideas.

Naeem stresses the need to educate yourself and to start a relationship with attorney, even if you don’t hire them right away. This is what I have done and I can tell you that it is a very good strategy to get started. As you go along you educate yourself through books, online resources and from others. Then when you are ready and you need help with a particular legal document, you know what to do and where to go. So do your home work and read this book.

A version of this post appeared at TelecomPk.net

Partnering with Rozee.pk, they’ve recently launched a mobile interface to the popular job portal. Ufone users can now get mobile alerts, and if they have GPRS enabled, even apply right there through the Rozee website.

How to use it is available on the Ufone website here. Read on after the jump on some views on how this service might be beneficial or distracting.

Now for some critique. Being a regular employer from Rozee, i’ll share two tips from my own experience.

1. Normally, the first 20 (usable) applications are the ones from where shortlisting is done. It is very rare that someone applying 2 days after a job has been posted will be shortlisted. Also, i mention usable as those applicants that actually have the qualifications and experience, and not just applying for the sake of applying.

2.  A CV may be very well defined, but a readable and understandable cover letter is what will get you through the second line of defense of resume sifters, the managers who will be directly managing the new recruit. A CV doesn’t really tell them much, and an interview is a long and boring process. The cover letter fast tracks much of this process.

With these two points in mind, the UJob portal is very useful for ensuring the first part for an employer. Instant applications as soon as the job goes live. Normally, i’ve recieved the first 20 applications within the first couple of hours from rozee, however, there is a lot of noise in that applicant pool as well. Unfortunately, there are quite a few people who just send out their resume wherever and whenever they can, without even realizing what they applied for. I hope the introduction of a mobile method of application doesn’t increase the noise to a crescendo!

Second, personally, i don’t think typing out a cover letter, using SMS-speak (lol, l8r etc), will do much good to an applicant’s overall profile. And it remains to be seen how many people would actually go the route of writing out a cover letter anyway. On my last job posting, out of the 250 applications i received, only 5 had cover letters. Apart from one guy, whose cover letter itself was generic (why do people do that!!!), the other four were called in for interviews, and the final selection was from among them. So yea, the mobile application might become a new reason for not submitting a valid cover letter in the first place.

So all in all, the service is both a good step forward and will bring it’s own challenges for the rozee team as well as employers. The end result however, as always, remains to be seen.

In his latest book, Strategy and the Fat Smoker, David Maister writes that just by knowing what is good for you or bad for you will not help people choose the better path. If that was so, he argues, everyone would be exercising and not indulging in the habits of smoking or drinking. After all, everyone knows that is the path to a healthy and better life. Humans are inherently self serving and looking out for number one, i.e. themselves. And they are not rational creatures, but creatures of emotion. At most, they create circles around themselves and include people whose needs they might also serve, but for many, that circle includes only one. When thinking about management, especially management of people, this is one of the basic truths or facts of life one must embrace if they want any chance at moving forward.

People management has always been a very interesting subject for experts around the world. They recognize the need for having a structured environment for people to work in, to have a schedule of tasks to complete and a clear and concise goal to achieve. The funny thing is, most people who have to be managed also recognize this need. Yet, often quite a big disconnect keeps on appearing in organizations around the country (and the world) and a lot of productivity (read: money) is lost in the process. In order to bridge this disconnect, we increasing find the need to satisfy a employee’s personal needs and align them to the company’s need in order for the big money to start rolling in.

So how do we bridge this gap? Any idea’s?

I have been hearing two things lately from people I meet.  And largely you can divide them into two groups. First group is the people who are saying stay safe lie low, if you have a job thank your stars and stay put don’t make a move till 2009 is over.

Then there are the others, the more fearless ones who are feeling the change are seeing the half full glass.

You might have heard a lot of the negative side I would like to put in front of you the arguments of these crazy fearless people and let you be the judge of their sanity here are their arguments

They are saying since there are budget cuts every where, companies with smaller foot prints are getting a chance to present them selves. People who never considered smaller service providers or vendors are considering smaller companies who can offer competitive prices. They are saying companies who previously never even gave them audience are opening to doing business with them because they can provide competitive services at rates lower than bigger counterparts.

Second argument they have is that quality human resource is available at pays that smaller companies can afford. Because all the big ones are shedding of extra weight human resource is available to newer companies at packages which they can afford. And because the fact that bigger is secure no longer holds true, the employees are understanding the reality that at this time a smaller company has more chances to pass through this recession than bigger companies. This is helping these newer companies to start attracting good talent.

Another thing they say is cost of running has gone down a little, with rents going down with this recession. Landlords agreeing to offer their space at lesser security deposit and lesser advance makes it easier for some one to setup a shop.

I don’t know if you agree to these points or not but in last few weeks I have seen 3 people leave their secure jobs and start their businesses.  Have seen an exponential increase in head hunting efforts by companies who are deeply rooted here, and as of now know at least 3 companies who are hiring like crazy.

What with the crisis in the economy, employees are especially concerned about their performance reviews. As a manager, you probably hate them, too. They’re a bureaucratic pain in the you-know-what, one that you would rather avoid. As a result, you wait until the last minute to prepare. Don’t do it, says management consultant Leila Bulling Towne in this new BNET video. Instead, plan your reviews carefully to put your employees, and yourself, at ease.

Here is the video:

Vopium is a Danish-Pakistani portal that focus on providing a platform for almost free calls and SMS to any part of the world. As we covered in one of earlier posts, they have got a  funding of EUR4.2 million.

The company’s operations are mostly based out of Lahore since 2003 and currently 50 employees are developing new applications in this facility. Tanveer Sharif, Vopium’s co-founder, recently told me that they are planning to double the workforce before the end of 2009. They are also planning to expand their operations.

Speaking of VC funding, he said that it has both its pros and cons but they’ll help other Pakistani companies to get funding.

As for the VC funding, let me assure you that it is not always a blessing. We have raised USD 6.8M last year, and we would love to help other Pakistani companies to achieve financial injections.

He also said that they are helping other Danish-Pakistani companies to set up their operations in Pakistan. Some of these are Gatefone, Youpark and Getmore.

However, there are two sorts of monitoring, ethical monitoring and un-ethical monitoring. These days, online monitoring is one of the recent ways to judge an employee’s performance. Companies have well defined policies regarding usage of internet. This online monitoring may have many positive aspects but this also raises the chance of unethical monitoring. I tell you what unethical monitoring is, that is reading your emails, chats or personal data without your consent or knowledge under the pretext of monitoring.

Most of us, when come to office in the morning, first thing we do along with checking our official email is to check our personal account as well. How many of us stop and think of what if your boss or any other techie person in your office is also reading your personal emails or chats? Or what if there is a spyware on your computer without your knowledge? This is actually happening! Now if getting the work done is the employer’s right then privacy of checking personal email is the employee’s right too. If the employer fears of valuable information being exploited or leaked then these websites should be banned from the workplace instead of being monitored discreetly as this is I believe, totally unethical.

The above quote is taken from a paper “The Trouble With Enterprise Software” by Cynthia Rettig, published by Sloan Management Review. I recommend it to everyone who is involved with software and business. It is especially useful for non-technical executives. If you are in the IT/software field, it is very common to experience the tension between business and IT. This paper debunks many of the common myths and makes an honest assessment of the often messy situation with enterprise software.

A few excerpts from the paper.

As work became more complex and specialized over the 20th century, the use of data — numbers and facts — as fodder for more and more analysis and fact-based decision making intensified. And digital technology “was perfect for this kind of world.” Of course, digital technology not only supported that complexity but also played a large part in actually creating it, weaving a continuous web of unending data.

What do business executives miss?

Business executives, however, simply want to continue to believe that technology will lower costs, improve processes and reduce the size of the workforce. They don’t want to understand IT issues. In part, this is because technology requires special skills and intellectual talents that are quite distinct from those needed to understand and manage business organizations, markets and strategy. But it is also because executives do not like to hear about the downside of technology.

On the difficulty of aligning technical and business sides:

… long-term plan calls for closer and closer communication and collaboration between the IT and business sides of the organization. While much to be desired, this has proved difficult in the past, and with increasing complexity in software systems, it is unlikely to improve by itself in the future. Differing backgrounds and perspectives, goals, even vocabularies — all hamper efforts to improve communication across this internal digital divide. Biases intrude: A recent study by Forrester Research Inc. of Cambridge, Massachusetts, found that only 28% of CEOs thought their CIOs were proactive or creative in terms of business process improvement

The pdf of the paper is available through Google search.

The Trouble With Enterprise Software
Has enterprise software become too complex to be effective?
Cynthia Retting
Fall 2007 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 21